James Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Fought for Black Rights in New Orleans

The Confederate General Who Fought for Black Rights in New Orleans

James Longstreet is one of the most fascinating figures in New Orleans history precisely because he doesn't fit any of the categories that the city—or the South—wants to put people in. He was Robert E. Lee's most trusted general during the Civil War. And then, in one of the most remarkable reversals in American history, he became a Republican, befriended Ulysses S. Grant, and led Black militia troops in combat against white supremacists in the streets of New Orleans.

Longstreet was born in South Carolina in 1821, graduated from West Point in 1842, and served with distinction in the Mexican-American War. When the Civil War began, he joined the Confederacy and quickly proved himself one of the ablest commanders on either side. As commander of the First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, he was Lee's right hand at Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg. Lee called him "my old war horse."

After the war, Longstreet moved to New Orleans and did something that made him the most hated man in the former Confederacy: he accepted the results of the war. He joined the Republican Party. He publicly supported his old friend Ulysses S. Grant for president. He argued that the South should work with the federal government rather than resist Reconstruction. In a region that was constructing the mythology of the Lost Cause, Longstreet was committing apostasy.

But he went further. In 1874, during the violent political crisis that convulsed New Orleans, Longstreet commanded the city's Metropolitan Police and state militia—which included Black troops—against the White League, a paramilitary organization of white Democrats determined to overthrow the Reconstruction government. The Battle of Liberty Place was a brief, bloody confrontation on Canal Street in which Longstreet's forces were initially overrun. Longstreet himself was wounded and briefly captured.

For a former Confederate lieutenant general to lead Black soldiers against white supremacists in the streets of New Orleans was an act of moral courage that the South would never forgive. His former comrades vilified him. The Lost Cause mythmakers—particularly Jubal Early and his allies—rewrote the history of the war to blame Longstreet for the defeat at Gettysburg, a campaign of character assassination that persisted for over a century.

Longstreet didn't help his own cause by publicly criticizing Lee's decisions at Gettysburg—in the cult of Lee that developed after the war, this was the ultimate heresy. But modern historians have largely vindicated Longstreet's military assessments while recognizing that the attacks on his reputation were politically motivated.

He served in various federal positions under Republican presidents, including as U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and as a U.S. marshal. He died in 1904 in Georgia at eighty-two, still a pariah in the South he had fought for and then tried to reform.

James Longstreet's New Orleans chapter is one of the most remarkable stories in the city's history. A Confederate war hero who chose the losing side again—this time, the morally right one—and paid for it with his reputation. In a city full of complicated legacies, his might be the most complicated of all.